Slashdot Mirror
Sri Lanka Declares an Open Source Week
AnuradhaRatnaweera writes "Sri Lankan Government has declared (Google cache) the week starting from the 5th of September as the National Free and Open Source Software Week. The FOSS Community, Government's ICTA and the industry are working together to organize the week's events including the FOSSSL Conference and Asia Open Source Symposium. The week has been selected to end (well, almost) with the Software Freedom Day."
See here for why its a bad (and extremely annoying) idea to make every other word in the summary a link.
Er...first post, I guess. Where the hell is everybody?!
AN Open Source Week. Seriously.. are we outsourcing editorial work to India, too?
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
Before a vowel, "a" becomes "an", thus the headline should read "Sri Lanka declares an Open Source Week".
Really, this is trivial English grammar, and it does matter!
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Slashdot announces a gramer/spelink wek
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I suppose this is to lure people away from warez?
What are you expecting to find here?
If they celebrate open source and free software, they're essentially attacking proprietary and costly software. And if you're not paying for software, you're hurting American business. And if you are hurting American business, you're a terrorist.
Time to attack that piddly nation and that fat lazy western science fiction author!
You can't say "a open" it's "an open", Basic schoolboy grammer. Geez...
And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour Isaiah 3:5
Now that Sri Lanka supports open source, 2005 is sure to be the year of the Linux desktop!
Note to mods: I'm probably being sarcastic.
I mean, making what seems like a holiday for open source...next it will become a religion...
Ummm...Oh yeah. Nevermind. Too late.
I, for one, welcome our new Sri Lankan Open Source Celebrating Overlords.
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
Sri Lanka is also on the front line against Indian Imperialism and likes open source.
Go Sri Lanka !!!
Wow! thats a really powerful ally to have in the movement.
What is next? 'Podunk Idaho says no to AOL for a week' ?
Sheesh.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"Sri Lanki Declares Open Source Weak." Open source isn't weak, you insenstive Sri Lankan clods... Oh wait, where did I put my glasses?
Online citizen journalism from the inner city: The View From The Ground
Recent news from Sri Lanka
"Persecution of Christians has increased in Sri Lanka over the last several years. Statistics from the World Evangelical Alliance show that from January 2003 to March 2004 more than 140 anti-Christian incidents were recorded. These incidents ranged from mild threats to death warnings, arson, and the destruction of church buildings. Church leaders are especially at risk. There are currently efforts by Buddhist monks to pass an anti-conversion law."
...the US government declared every third week in June, July, and October in years ending in a prime number as Free Open Weapons Week encouraging defense contractor employees to work for free and deliver the bulk of their contracts during those time frames along with all engineering designs, blueprints, schematics, draftings, notes, e-mails, stickies, and copies of everything they ever doodled to the Pentagon as a measure of patriotism and national pride.
Yes, for the dense, that was sarcasm.
End users do not care if software source code is open to the winds or kept locked in a vault south southwest of Area 51. They care that it is cost effective, easy to use, and does what they want. That is all, that is it, cut and dried. This obsession with the words "free" and "open" is getting way past bizarre now and I think becoming raised to the level of religious fervor and dogma as a method of practicing psychological CYA in avoidance of "not getting it" as to why Windows and those who program on it continue to kick OSS ass consistantly.
It's more about avoiding taking responsibility for writing what is still for the average end-user crappy, hard to use, esoteric, inaccessible software which is what the OSS community would rather do than write things like the AOL client, Windows XP, etc. Point, click, it works, the horrors. Better to revel in our geek egos and write ten dozen different competing standards, take the "it's free so what do you want for support" attitude, and give away the source code freely and hype that.
I remember when I'd burn code that was less than what the other person expected out of me because it embarassed me. Now the Internet culture of saying more nothing in more ways has invaded coding and we write things, call them open, and give away the source as freely as we blog. If code is truly good and important, it doesn't matter if it is open or not. I don't use Xine, FC3, MTR, or a dozen other things because they are open. I'd pay like Windows software and not care if the code was open anyhow. I use them because I want them. Can't say that about the vast majority of code mucking up the world of (F)OSS.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
It's not exactly silicon valley... Do people even care about rights ensure by the GPL when they'd probably be ecstatic to have a magic wonder box that can compute results in seconds!
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
Sri Lanka has a population of 20 million and has 19 political parties.
--
Faith-based lying? Faith-based killing?
To FOSS activists in Sri Lanka
Being a Sri Lankan expatriate myself, I was surprised to see the momentum you all have gathered embracing FOSS.
My congratulations! It is high time for the developing countries to influence the future of global IT.
Good Luck
-.V.-
I work for a company called Interact whose hardware/software runs cell phone networks down there... and yes They DO run Linux! ;)
This is really a slow news day when the news of a small developing nation declaring it a "open-source week" can make it to the front page. Anybody can declare it a "week", and unless there's some hard commitment and actions behind it it's not really news. I heard Elbonia may consider declaring open-source month, if slashdot editors are in need of news.
the source for this week?
WFT does this have to do with Sri Lanka or open source week?
I have a settop box and yes it runs Linux, woopie.
You mean all 100 citizens?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Sorry for this obvious observation: why would any small country not want to use open source?
:-) make arguments for my standardizing on Windows Desktops is a good idea - but, for developing countries open source IT infrastructure is the best.
The only possible answer would be to be compatible with the world of all-things-Microsoft, but OpenOffice.org, AbiWord, etc. have good compatibility when you need it.
I am very much of a computer nerd so using Windows, Linux, and OS X all on a dayly basis does not bother me, but for 'normal people', multiple learning curves are too big of a hit on productivity.
Start kids off in grade school with a reasonable Linux distro like (for example) Ubuntu with OpenOffice.org (or a lighter weight word processor on limited computers), and save money and build up local infrastructure and capabilities.
For large companies in the US and Europe, I could (if I wanted to, which I don't
Microsoft Declares Open Souce Weak
Cracks me up he gets attacked for stating the obvious. The attitiude that you really owe it to someone/yourself/Linux to spend ten hours digging through bad doc to get something to work as opposed to using an easy-to-install user-friendly app is a real problem with acceptance of OSS, even if mostly undeserved in the actual practice. It's certainly the party line often enough.
I mean, here he's telling you what OSS apps he uses (frankly it's more than I do) and he still gets "flamebait" and is a "Windows user to rebut".
Yes, Windows XP still kicking Linux ass in any real terms in nearly any desktop situation you'd care to find. It may be running 3/4 of the cool new embedded h/w, servers and POS boxes up the wahoo, but not to the user.
Remember the users? We're all users sometime, and frankly, the older get I get the less of my precious time I want to spend dicking around with some program that demands a semester at sea to get working.
Make it work, make it easy, and people will use it whether it's free or not. That's all he's saying.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
nt
Calcutta declares an Open Sores week...
I kid I kid...
fyea8 the reaper are about 7000/5
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Sri Lanka at the edge of a civil war? Sounds like someone is trying to get some good press for their country.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Really, Sri Lanka isn't doing it because they want to. I'll bet half the people in Sri Lanka don't even know what Linux is. They probably just hate Microsoft like every /. person (and just like every /. person, they don't exactly know why).
And who ever heard of setting aside a day or days to celebrate computer software? That's gotta be the single stupidest thing I've ever heard.
Sorry guys, in the end, Linux loses.
Not your average
I know you can make a spreadsheet under Windows man, but let's face it, MS makes things easy for humans.
Trust me, I've worked with literally every Windows version ever, and for that matter every DOS version ever, and OS/2, CP/M, Solaris, Linux, etc. They all have their problems. When you say you've never had a problem using Linux it makes you sound like you really haven't tried to do that much. I'm sure that's not the case, but I think you're simplfying things a bit, no?
In the last 5 years I've processed 50M imaged documents and gawd knows how many ORM records using... wait for it.. Windows. Not my choice, really. But if you're a professional you make it happen.
What the original poster was saying, simply, was that people want easy to use stuff, and he's quite correct. The combination of free (as in beer OR speech) AND ease of use is what we need to get to.
Cheers...
BL
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Only a few has got computers here. But there are lot of activities happenning to change it. Including a project to put tens of thousands of GNU/Linux boxes in rural homes
Looks like many are thinking we are looking for FOSS as a cheap alternative, which is only a part of the story. We are more interested in the flexibility and independence than the cost itself.
And in terms of contribution, Sri Lanka hasn't been idle. For example, most of the Apahce Web Services contributers, including the lead, are living here.
Check out ELKS. It's a system based on Linux that runs on 16 bit PCs (including those based on the 8088).
Indeed, this is not the main Linux kernel, and the required changes will probably never be merged into the main tree, but it's at least theoretically possible to do so. The fact that this system is based on Linux is a testament to the flexibility Linux provides.
I'm not sure if ELKS is still being actively developed, but if you look at the main page, you'll see that it has been updated in 2003. This is long after Microsoft Windows abandoned stopped supporting the 8088 (that happened sometime in the mid-1980s IIRC).
Linux has also been known to run on watches, although it's entirely possible that current watches are much more computationally capable than 8088-based PCs.
Anyway, to make the point explicit: it's relatively easy to get Linux to work about pretty much any sort of computer. The most important reasons for this are:
1. It's open source, so if you have the skills and the tools, you can do it yourself. You are not dependent on somebody else to do it for you.
2. Linux has already been ported to a wide variety of hardware. Many assumptions about hardware working a certain way have been removed or put in architecture-dependent files.
3. Linux is based on a design (Unix) whose main innovation was portability, and the ability to run on low-spec hardware. Throughout Unix, the mantra has been Keep It Simple, Stupid. Also, the system is written in C, which was designed to abstract away from the differences in architecture.
4. Linux is less tied to a certain mode of interaction than other current operating systems. Whereas it's hard to imagine Windows without a GUI, Linux works fine with or without a GUI, with or without a keyboard, with or without a serial console, etc. etc. etc.
There is a snowball effect here; because of the easy access to the source (1), and the source being in a portable language (3), it's easy to compile Linux for a new device. In the porting process, assumptions about that hardware (2) and modes of interaction (4) will be isolated, making the code even easier to port to new architectures. This, in turn, leads Linux to compare favorable to competing OSes w.r.t. portability, increasing the chances that new devices will receive a Linux port. This reinforces 2, 3, and 4. Add to this the fact that the GPL requires sharing changes that you distribute, even 1 is reinforced, so there's a complete feedback loop.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Seems as if there's an element of SARCASM around here! :D
After all y cannot a developing nation adopt OSS?
If it does the work that's required, and much robust than the 'BULL' gates stuff